Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

ObamaCare Must Go!

By Alan
Caruba

Can anyone
remember how awful the U.S. healthcare free market system was that it needed to
be replaced by the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare?Can’t remember? That’s because it was ranked
one of the best of the world and represented 17.9% of the nation’s economy in
2014.That’s down from the 20% it
represented in 2009 when ObamaCare was foisted on Americans.

One of the
best ways to follow the ObamaCare story is via Health Care News, a monthly newspaper published by The Heartland
Institute. The January issue begins with an article by Sean Parnell, the
managing editor, reporting that ObamaCare enrollment is overstated by 400,000.

“The U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) once again lowered its estimate
of the number of Americans enrolled in health plans through government
exchanges in 2014. The 6.7 million enrollees who remain are far lower than the
eight million touted in May at the end of the last open-enrollment period.”

ObamaCare
has been a lie from the moment it was introduced for a vote, all 2,700 pages of
it, to the present day. Everything President Obama said about it was a lie. As
to its present enrollments, they keep dropping because some 900,000 who did
sign up did not make the first premium payment or later stopped paying.

Michael
Cannon, director of health policy studies as the Cato Institute, said the
dropout rate is a troubling trend. “It means that potentially hundreds of
thousands of Exchange enrollees are realizing they are better off waiting until
they get sick to purchase coverage. If enough people come to that conclusion,
the exchanges collapse.”

Elsewhere
in this month’s edition, there is an article, “States Struggle to Fund
Exchanges”, that reports on the difficulties that “states are experiencing difficulty
in paying the ongoing costs of the exchanges, especially small states. “’The
feds are asking us to do their jobs for them. We get saddled with the operating
costs,’ said Edmund Haislmaier, senior research fellow for health care policy
studies at The Heritage Foundation.” Some are imposing a two percent tax on the
insurance companies which, of course, gets passed along to the consumer. Even
so, the exchanges are not generating enough income to be maintained.

Why would
anyone want ObamaCare insurance when its rates keep rising dramatically? In
Nebraska the rates have nearly doubled and another article notes that “A 2014
study finds large numbers of doctors are declining to participate in health
plans offered through exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, raising
questions about whether people buying insurance through exchanges will be able
to access health care in a timely manner.” One reason physicians gave was that
they would have to hire additional staff “just to manage the insurance verification
process.”

Dr. Kris
Held, a Texas eye surgeon, said ObamaCare “fails to provide affordable health
insurance and fails to provide access to actual medical care to more people,
but succeeds in compounding existing health care costs and accessibility problems
and creating new ones.”

Health Care News reports what few other news outlets
have noted. “In Section 227 of the recently enacted ‘Cromnibus’ spending
measure, Congress added critical but little-noticed language that prohibits the
use of funds appropriated to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to
pay for insurance company bailouts.” William Todd, an Ohio attorney, further
noted that “Congress did not appropriate any separate funding for ‘bailouts.’”
Todd predicted that “some insurers are likely to raise premiums to avoid
losses, or they will simply stop offering policies on the exchanges
altogether.”

The
picture of ObamaCare failure emerging from these excerpts is a very true one.
Its momentum, in fact, is gaining.

In
mid-December, the Wall Street Journal opined that “With the Supreme Court due
to rule on a major ObamaCare legal challenge by next summer, thoughts in
Washington are turning to the practical and political response. If the Court
does strike down insurance subsidies, the question for Republicans running
Congress is whether they will try to fix the problems Democrats created, or
merely allow ObamaCare damage to grow.”

“King v.
Burwell will be heard in March with a ruling likely in June. “Of the 5.4
million consumers on federal exchanges, some 87% drew subsidies in 2014,
according to a Rand Corporation analysis.”

The Wall
Street Journal recommended that “The immediate Republican goal should be to
make insurance cheaper so people need less of a subsidy to obtain insurance.
This means deregulating the exchanges, plank by plank. Devolve to states their
traditional insurance oversight role, and allow them to enter into cross-border
compacts to increase choice and competition. Allow insurers to sell any
configuration of benefits to anyone, anywhere, and the private market will
gradually heal.”

Or, to put
it another way, eliminate ObamaCare entirely and return to the healthcare
insurance system that had served Americans well until the White House decided
that socialism was superior to capitalism. The problem with the Affordable Care
Act is that the cost of the insurance sold under the Act is not affordable and
ObamaCare is actually causing hospitals and clinics to close their doors, thus
reducing healthcare services for those who need them.

ObamaCare
must go. If the Republicans in Congress did nothing more than repeal ObamaCare,
the outcome of the 2016 election would be a predictable win no matter who their
candidate will be. If not repeal, some separate actions must be taken such as
eliminating the tax on medical instruments.

If the
Republican Congress fails to take swift and deliberate action on ObamaCare
between now and the 2016 elections, they will have defeated themselves.

3 comments:

My Congressman told me that ObamaCare can't be repealed, he said it MUST be dismantled one piece at a time... Now we all know that it was passed in one fell swoop, it can be done away with the same way, IF the Congress and Senate put their *Big Boy* pants on and do it...

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.